The Y7 Implementation Taskforce is established!

Anna Harris - Y7 Implementation Task Force Co-Chair

Disillusion with leaders and democratic participation is growing increasingly rife. We see the Y7 as an opportunity to tackle this. Not only by showing young people that change is possible, but by equipping them with the skills, confidence and platforms to drive that change themselves.

Our job has been made easier in that a group of young people working together over last summer, the Y7 Design Working Group, have already designed what the four key principles of the Y7 should be. We now need to take action to materialise that vision.

Inclusive

In previous years, the Y7 has focused mainly on the Y7 delegates themselves and mainly on the Y7 summit. Whilst we have always placed importance on recruiting a diverse group, the small number of delegates and the length of the summit limits the inclusivity that this approach can achieve.

As such, we want to use the Y7 as a platform to capture more young voices, especially those that are often silenced from such spaces. To do this, we are operating a two-track approach. We are recruiting a youth forum of young people with lived experience of the policy issues we are tackling, who will be involved every step of the way. And, we are prioritising consultation and engagement with young people from every corner of the G7 countries as a key part of the Y7 policy making process.

Impact

This is not a model summit. Whilst it is an opportunity for young people to practice their negotiation and policy making skills, we want their interactions and ideas to have real world impact.

Therefore, we are concentrating on developing a communique that is more focused, relationships with high-level decision makers that can lead to more leverage, and we are aligning our own pre-negotiations with ministerial ones to ensure that we can feed into the G7 process earlier.

Development

At FLN, we believe the key to good leadership is skills, experience and networks. We’re not going to be throwing our delegates into negotiations without these and are planning top quality training and opportunities for them along the way. We are looking far and wide for the most interesting, experienced people possible to help deliver this.  

Again, we’re not limiting this development to just our Y7 delegates. We want to utilise any engagement we have with our youth forum members, and all of those we consult with along the way, as an opportunity to a) teach them about high level international decision-making b) empower them to use their voice to create change.

Adaptable

The pressures of Covid19 and the environmental crises both mean that the summit and the work surrounding it are going to be a bit different this year. The taskforce are working as hard as they can to create a summit, training plan and consultation that doesn’t succumb to death-by-video chat. We would love to hear your ideas on how we can make a virtual world as exciting as the real one.

So that’s our aim!  It’s not going to be an easy task, but we have a strong team (hyperlink here) and we have a strong vision. Every two weeks a different member of the team is going to be writing a blog post so you can know what we are up to, give your own suggestions and find out how you can get more involved.

We can’t wait to have you along for the ride.